Although many systems exist in the art for reducing total dissolved salts from water, many of these systems suffer from a number of disadvantages.
For example, one existing method for water treatment involves transferring the water through a number of graded beds of filtration media. This acts as a pre-treatment for the water. However, media beds typically have a large footprint and can be of significant weight. Both of these factors mean that media bed filtration may be unsuitable and/or uneconomic to run in many applications, such as offshore applications where space and weight capacity are limited. Furthermore, it has been found that the quality of output from media bed filtration systems can vary significantly leading to fouling of the membranes which impairs filtration performance.
More recently, microfiltration or ultrafiltration systems have been developed to remove particulate matter, the product of which is then pumped through a series of nanofiltration or reverse osmosis filters. This process has been found to be energy intensive, especially if high pressure pumps are used, as are often required.
An object of embodiments of the present invention is to provide a filtration system which obviates or mitigates disadvantages of existing systems.